


Cut & Caper

by moemachina



Category: Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
Genre: A Life of the Mind, Academia, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Friends With Benefits, M/M, Profanity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:42:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21902443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moemachina/pseuds/moemachina
Summary: When Toby had broken up with Andy, he had saidI want us to stay friends, because that was just a thing you said. Everyone knew that. Nobody took it literally. Nobody except little Andrew Aguecheek.
Relationships: Sir Andrew Aguecheek/Sir Toby Belch
Comments: 18
Kudos: 41
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Cut & Caper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goosecathedral](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goosecathedral/gifts).



Toby woke up with the terrible premonition of a headache behind his eyeballs. That made him feel so intensely sorry for himself that it took him a moment to realize that another person’s naked shoulder was wedged up against his arm.

 _Oh no_ , Toby thought. _Who the fuck did I bring home last night?_

Various alarming possibilities flashed through his mind. Eustace? Beatrice? Frank? Oh, fuck, if it was Frank, then he was extremely fucked, because Frank was married to a terrifying biologist slash amateur bodybuilder who took monogamy very seriously.

Toby took a moment to steel both himself and his soul before he turned his head to look at his companion.

As a result, the sight of Andy -- sound asleep, drooling slightly, extremely naked -- caused Toby to feel a complicated mixture of both relief and disappointment.

Andy made a faint noise in his sleep and snuggled closer.

Carefully, very carefully, Toby wiggled to the left until he was no longer in physical contact with Andy, and then he wormed his way out of the covers and out of the bed.

He was far too hungover to move with cat-like grace, but he did manage to fall onto the carpet with a minimum of noise. For a moment, he remained motionless as he listened for any sound of Andy waking up -- and, when the silence continued, he crawled to his closet and plucked down the blue terrycloth robe hanging just inside.

 _Why Andy?_ Toby thought, crouching next to the closet as he shrugged on his robe. His memory of the previous evening’s holiday party was splotchy and scattered, and the fragments he could remember did not supply a ready answer to the question. Andy must have been at the holiday party; it was his department, after all, and Toby was merely crashing the festivities. But what had happened last night that had made past-Toby think, _You know what would be fun? Hooking up with the most clingy of my exes! Let’s really re-live some of those greatest hits, Tobias!_

On the bed, Andy made a little noise, and Toby peered over at his prone form with horror. Oh god, what if he had lied to Andy? What if he had said they should get back together? Would drunk past-Toby have stooped so low just to get laid? Would drunk past-Toby have been so vicious and vengeful toward hungover current-Toby?

 _Yes_ , Toby thought immediately. Past-Toby was a scumbag. Past-Toby felt as little responsibility to Current-Toby as Current-Toby (grimly knotting the robe around his waist) currently felt toward Future-Toby. (Fuck _that_ guy.)

Andy made another little noise and then, smacking his lips, rolled on his back. A second later, he began to snore faintly.

Toby crept to the door of his bedroom, pulled open the door, stepped outside and then -- slowly, patiently -- pulled the door shut. There was an audible click when he released the door handle, and Toby cringed, but there was no immediate response that he could hear from within the bedroom.

Toby released the breath he had been holding.

He turned around to face the living room. For several minutes, he squinted at the room suspiciously, as if he could use its disorder to painstakingly re-construct the past night’s poor life choices. Not that it required a great deal of detection. On the glass surface of his coffee table stood two wine glasses, each containing a little dried-out bullseye of red wine, and a few sheets of slightly rumpled printer paper.

 _Oh fuck_ , Toby thought, _did I lure Andy home by telling him he should read my latest poems? How could that have possibly worked? Even on goddamn Andy? Fuck, that man should not be allowed out and about on his own._

When Toby had broken up with Andy, he had said _I want us to stay friends_ , because that was just a thing you said. Everyone knew that. Nobody took it literally. Nobody except little Andrew Aguecheek, who had immediately brightened and said _I'd like that an awful lot, Toby_. And so -- unlike the vast majority of Toby's ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends -- Andy did not block Toby on social media. Andy texted Toby whenever the cafe in the university library was giving away unsold blueberry muffins. When Andy and Toby ran into each other at parties, Andy always smiled to see him (unlike the vast majority of Toby's ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends).

Of course, Toby had not responded to these blueberry muffins or spoken to Andy at those parties, because he didn't want to be sucked back into Andy's exasperating tentacles. But it had been a little nice, all the same. 

But now Andy undoubtedly thought that he and Toby were getting back together, and as soon as he woke up, he was going to come out of that bedroom and make dopey puppy-dog eyes at Toby, and Toby was going to have to endure his awkward, clumsy, endless conversation for one, maybe two hours, before he could decently call Andy an Uber and send him on his nattering way.

Toby’s incipient headache was rising to the fore.

In the kitchen, he automatically opened the fridge door to look for a LaCroix before belatedly remembering that he was out of LaCroix and had not remembered to pick up a fresh pack at the bodega. He was out of bottled water as well.

Toby reluctantly poured himself a glass of water from the tap and drank it joylessly.

His phone was sitting on the counter, and Toby absently flicked it on. He had forgotten to plug it in the previous night, and the battery meter read 11%.

Toby directed one longing, hopeless look toward his bedroom door, and the phone charger that he knew lay behind it, before turning back to his phone.

He had received two texts from Maria, one sent six hours earlier and one sent thirty minutes ago. The first text read, **ask andy what rhymes with cicero**.

Toby grimaced. He remembered now that Maria had also been at last night's party, drinking a perpetual gin-and-ginger and leaning against a wall and gazing up at him through thick eyelashes and saying, in her deep purring voice, _Have you ever thought about writing a campus novel from the perspective of a middle-class, middle-aged misunderstood white man, Toby?_

(Past-Toby, already three drinks in and a little unsteady on his feet, had replied, _I’m hardly middle-aged_ , and Maria had flatly countered, _You’re thirty-one, sweetheart_ before continuing her line of thought. _Maybe have a crisis of conscience, roll around in a little despair, and then have a brief affair with a flexible undergraduate who appreciates your rare literary genius_? She wet her lower lip without breaking eye-contact, and past-Toby, feeling all the blood rush to his lower extremities, had said--)

“Hmm,” current-Toby said, scrolling to the next text message, which said, **hey are you going to be at the beach for xmas**.

Toby silently regarded this message. He had not planned on going to the family beach house for the holidays, even though it was tradition, even though he had been invited. Partly it was the expense, and partly it was because it meant spending time in close proximity with the family lawyer, the deeply insufferable Malvolio, who generally seemed to think he was a member of the family and not merely an employee. Malvolio liked to lecture Toby about the economic viability of his MFA: _have you ever thought about learning to code, Toby?_ The last time Toby had seen Malvolio was at the funeral, and that night Toby had spent a cathartic hour googling, in incognito mode, variations on the phrase _best way to dispose of body_. (The answer, according to the internet, was lye.)

Going to the beach house for Christmas meant a lot more time with Malvolio, and that was enough reason in and of itself not to attend. But mostly the reason that Toby was not going was because this Christmas was going to be the first Christmas since Toby’s brother had died, and Toby recoiled at the thought of spending days trapped in a house with a bunch of sad memories and his white-faced niece.

On the other hand, maybe Maria was going to be at the beach house? It had not occurred to Toby that she might be going, but in retrospect, it made sense. Maria was Olivia’s best friend, after all.

If Maria was going, it changed Toby’s calculations. A whole world of possibilities opened in front of him: Maria in a bikini (despite the frigid winter temperature of the ocean); Maria curled up next to him in front of a fire as they drank whiskey-diluted eggnog (despite the fact that Maria was an avowed vegan); Maria slipping into his bedroom late one night while wearing only a silk nightie and a Santa hat (despite the fact that, heretofore, Toby had only seen Maria in her habitual uniform of jeans and ironic T-shirts).

 **Haven’t decided yet** , Toby texted back. **Are you going?**

 **yes** , Maria texted back immediately. **you need to come have you talked to olivia recently** **im worried about her**

Toby frowned down at his phone, his vision of Maria wearing a Santa hat and a naughty smile beginning to tremble at its edges. Olivia had withdrawn from all her classes for the semester, and Toby did not think she would return in the spring. **No. Not since the funeral. What’s going on?**

**shes really depressed she needs people around her right now**

Toby stared down at his phone for several heartbeats. His headache was pounding in sync with his pulse. He pursed his mouth and punched two characters on his phone screen before hitting send:

**:(**

**jesus fucking christ** , Maria texted back, and he could almost hear Maria saying it, almost spitting it out, her voice loud, her eyes disapproving.

Toby, well-used and essentially immune to Maria’s disapproval, responded, **Pretty busy these days, M. Not sure I can make it**.

 **make it** , Maria responded. **you owe it to your brother’s daughter**

“Yeah, yeah,” Toby said aloud in his kitchen. He sighed as he put down his phone (now with a battery level at 6%). “Sure, sure.”

He opened a cabinet door and began rooting around for coffee. In the back, he found a quarter-full bag of local-roasted coffee beans from the place around the corner, and he shook them into his grinder mournfully. Soon he’d need to buy more coffee, but times had been a little lean for ol’ Tobias Belch recently. Certain sacrifices needed to be made. The local-roasted coffee beans were hard to justify in a period of looming austerity. As was LaCroix.

“Until I sell some more stock, it’s just going to be Bustelo coffee and Poland Spring for poor little Toby,” he muttered to himself as he twisted shut the bag of coffee beans. “Maybe some Chef Boyardee if I’m feeling fancy.”

He sighed wearily as he pressed down the button atop the coffee grinder, and as it began to buzz loudly, he belatedly remembered Andy.

_Oh, fuck._

The grinder buzzed vengefully for a minute, and then Toby allowed it to lapse into silence. He knew it was too much to ask that Andy had slept through that noise, but he dared to hope it anyway.

From the closed bedroom door came the sound of someone moving around.

“Fuck my life,” Toby whispered wearily as he hit the lever on his electric kettle. He unpeeled a paper coffee filter from its pack and fluffed it out within his white ceramic coffee cone.

By the time Andy emerged from the bedroom, buttoning the top of his shirt, Toby was pouring hot water over a second cup of coffee.

“Good morning,” Andy said in his curiously unidentifiable accent, and Toby remembered -- for the tenth or twelfth time -- that Maria had once observed snidely that he sounded like a boy at an English boarding school trying to imitate Keanu Reeves.

“Want some coffee?” Toby said neutrally, bracing himself for what Andy might do. Would he gaze at Toby with limpid eyes? Would he breathlessly call Toby his “boyfriend”? (Oh god, anything but that.) Would he try to hug Toby?

Once upon a time, Andy had done all of these things (along with some very injudicious “I love you’s”).

However, in this moment, Andy did none of these horrifying things. Instead he said, “Oh, goody, coffee” as he seated himself at the kitchen bar and accepted the steaming mug that Toby handed him. “Do you have any oatmilk?”

“No,” Toby said shortly.

“Ah, well,” Andy said philosophically before he took a sip of his black coffee.

Toby removed the ceramic cone from his mug and set it in the sink. “So.”

Andy said nothing but merely looked at Toby expectantly.

“So,” Toby said after a long pause, taking up his own mug of coffee. “I hope you slept well.”

“Oh, yes, thank you.” Andy took another unconcerned sip.

“Quite a party last night,” Toby said.

“Indeed,” Andy said politely.

“Your department really knows how to throw a shindig,” Toby said.

Andy frowned. “Well,” he said slowly, “they certainly have a large liquor budget. But I suppose that’s the same thing, really.” He took another sip. “Surprised they allowed that undergrad in, given all the alcohol floating around. You know the one, Maria? The one you were trying to flirt with?”

“She’s twenty-one,” Toby said automatically before he registered Andy’s last sentence. It had been said calmly; it was a simple statement of fact expressed without an ounce of jealousy. “Was I flirting with her?” This conversation was not going the way he had expected.

“Well, I couldn’t say,” Andy said earnestly. “I can never tell if anyone is flirting with anyone. But you told me you were flirting with her, and you didn’t seem like you were joking. Of course, I can’t tell when people are joking or not either. I suppose it’s rather like flirting. It’s always confusing when people say one thing but mean anoth--”

“Maria,” Toby interrupted. “I told you I was flirting with Maria.”

“Oh, right, yes,” Andy said. “You said you were flirting with Maria, and you were going to try to pick me up in front of her and see if it made her jealous, and best-case scenario, you’d go home with Maria, and worst-case scenario, you’d go home with me.”

Toby, despite being a hardened soul, despite being what Maria might term _a real motherfucker_ , could not help wincing at this. “Did I literally say that? That worst-case scenario thing?”

“Oh, yes,” Andy said, and then he saw Toby’s expression and said, “Oh, no, but not in a mean way! You said that, for a worst-case scenario, going home to fool around with a friend was no terrible thing. It was fine! It was nice!” Then, seeing Toby’s expression continue to be dubious, Andy smiled helplessly and gave him two thumbs up. Which, somehow, made the whole thing even worse.

Toby stared down at his coffee mug. At last, he said, quietly, “Did I show you my new poems?”

“Oh, well, yesssssss,” Andy said slowly. “You did. Yes.”

“And what did you think of them?”

Andy’s eyes widened. “Oh, well! Well! They were awfully clever, Toby. Awfully clever. The rhymes! The imagery!” Andy gave a nervous little cough. “And, uh, the length. I’ve never seen a sonnet like that before.”

“It’s true,” Toby said broodingly. “The innovation of that fifteenth line will be my lasting contribution to the form, I daresay.”

“Indeed!” Andy cried. “I was overwhelmed! Speechless! Transfixed!” He paused for a moment, clearly trying to think of more adjectives. “Gobsmacked! Amazed! And just, you know, generally impressed!”

A terrible suspicion gripped Toby. He had been braced for Andy to be adoring, moist, and insufferable, so the actuality of Andy -- who was not pining; who was not misunderstanding the situation; who was not trying to bury Toby under the terrible weight of _expectations_ \-- was profoundly unsettling already. But even worse was the suspicion that Toby had _not_ taken advantage of a stupidly lovestruck ex last night.

(A series of scattered memories were growing clearer by the minute: Andy wrapping a friendly arm around Toby’s shoulder and saying, _I think you’ve had enough, my dear_ ; a pause and then Andy saying, _Etchings? You want to show me etchings? Well, I don’t know if I know much about etchings but I’m happy to share a taxi home_ ; a gap and then they were both sitting on Toby’s couch as Toby drunkenly pressed his fourth or fifth poem into Andy’s hands, and Andy looked longingly at the front door, so far away, before his hands went to the top button on his shirt and he said _Hey, Toby, do you want to fool around_?)

Toby swallowed thickly. “Hey,” he said, mainly to get Andy to stop babbling, “do you want anything to eat?”

“Certainly,” Andy said happily. “Could I have a kale smoothie?”

Toby rolled his eyes. “No. Gross.”

Andy shrugged. “My mother says I need to eat lots of greens this month. She says that my water sign is currently in the house of Taurus.”

“Does she,” Toby said levelly. He had never formally met Andy’s mother, though he knew her by sight: she had single-handedly built AGUECHEEK COSMETICS, now a multi-billion enterprise, and now she frequently appeared on the company’s ads, doing a demonstration of the red blush that helped create the company’s signature “beautiful bubonic” look. ( _Swoon with beauty_ was the tagline for the current ad campaign.)

“Or possibly my star sign is in the house of water,” Andy was saying now. “I may be mis-remembering. Astrology seems frightfully complicated, Toby.”

“I can make you a fried egg,” Toby said, thinking of his largely empty refrigerator. “Would you eat a fried egg?”

“Yes,” Andy said. “I’ll just eat a head of lettuce tonight and it will all average out, I believe.”

“Very important,” Toby said as he opened his fridge door and began to root around the interior.

“Mother will want to know I’ve been following her advice,” Andy said. “Especially because I’m afraid that she’s a trifle annoyed with me now.”

“Why?” Toby asked, pushing aside a carton of moldy take-out rice in order to reach his carton of eggs. “What did you do?”

“I’m afraid that I told her that I could not spend Christmas with her,” Andy said. “In particular, I could not spend Christmas with her and her new _beau_.” Andy said the final word with a particular note of venom. “Toby, can you believe that, during Thanksgiving dinner, the man had the temerity to lecture me, _me_ , about the military training of the Roman legions?”

“Scandalous,” Toby said, digging out his frying pan from the bottom layer of the dirty dishes in his sink. He turned it upside down and gave it a few firm thwacks against the side of the sink, dislodging most of the crisp food bits still stuck to it. “Did he have any idea who he was talking to?”

“Oh, yes,” Andy said. “That’s what made it particularly insufferable. He thinks he knows something, just because he’s been to a few public lectures by Pickens. But Pickens is a fool!” Andy slammed his hand down on the counter. “Pickens is a stain on the whole profession.”

Toby put the frying pan on the burner and clicked on the flame. “Is this the guy you hate because of the...endnotes?”

“It’s not _just_ the endnotes,” Andy hissed. “Although choosing to use endnotes rather than footnotes on a forty-page pre-circulated seminar paper ought to be a hanging offense. But no. It was the font choice, Toby. What sort of coke-addled buffoon uses Helvetica for their font? It was a disgrace, Toby. A positive sham of scholarship. How anyone made it through that paper with a straight face, I’ll never know.”

“Hmmm,” Toby said, cracking an egg into the hot pan. He had forgotten that, while most of the time Andy was sweet and slow and placid (bordering, perhaps, on comatose), certain things triggered an unexpectedly strong reaction. Nothing made Andy surge into a sudden fury more than minor academic disagreements in his tiny super-specialized area of study -- which was something about ancient Rome, although Toby had always zoned out immediately whenever Andy tried to explain his dissertation to him.

Andy’s uncharacteristic moments of belligerence was the thing that had initially attracted Toby, although Toby would absolutely never admit it. They had first met because Olivia and Maria had brought Toby to their department’s end-of-the-year party -- _come on, uncle, there’s free food and you can see all the professors we hate, and I guarantee it will be more fun than any of those terrible Writing Sems parties with the gluten-free crackers that you’re always bitching about_ \-- and there Andy had been, planted next to the guacamole as he harangued some mousy colleague.

 _Who is the shouty guy_ , Toby had asked.

 _That’s Andy_ , Olivia had said, _He’s one of the TAs for our Classical Worlds class._

 _He’s a complete fool_ , Maria had added. _During our discussion sections, he just looks up funny Youtube videos about Rome. We’ve watched_ Life of Brian _three different times. Says that he’s running a quote unquote flipped classroom, whatever that means._

(“I believe in subverting the imposed hierarchies of the classroom,” Andy would later tell Toby.)

 _He doesn’t shout in our section_ , Olivia had said, watching Andy with a slight frown.

 _He totally shouts in lectures, though_ , Maria had said. _Every twenty minutes, he’s raising his hand to disagree with the professor. Who hates him. The other TAs hate him too. They told me that he’s been a grad student forever, and that he keeps changing his topic, and that he’s never going to finish but it doesn’t matter because his family is, like, mega-wealthy. His mom is a make-up tycoon or something. Can you imagine inheriting money from something that awful? So gross._

Olivia and Toby -- whose family fortune had been established several centuries ago on various acts of piracy and war-profiteering -- exchanged a silent look.

 _Apparently_ , Maria continued, _he’s been telling the other grad students that he no longer thinks one PhD is enough, and that he wants to start a second one and do the two degrees at the same time._

(“Philology has always been my first love,” Andy would later tell Toby, “but of late, other muses have begun to beckon me, like the sirens of old...”)

_And the other grad students double-hate him right now, because he keeps getting department funding even though he doesn’t need it, and he’s completely oblivious. I heard them talking about him after class last week. A totally classic trust-fund baby._

Olivia -- who was the beneficiary of a trust herself, although Maria had not yet realized it -- looked guiltily down at her shoes. Toby just laughed. _I must meet this lion of scholarship_ , he said. _Olivia, Maria, you must introduce me!_

And it was only subsequently that Toby discovered that Andy’s mode of loud, spluttering disapproval -- the Mr. Hyde component of his personality -- only came out to play on vanishingly rare occasions. Instead, most of the time he was hesitant and babbling and diffident. Additionally, Toby soon found, to his horror, that Andy was almost pathetically grateful for Toby’s attentions. Gratitude had no business in any relationship involving Tobias Belch. Friction, yes. Cruelty, great. Contempt, sure. Disapproval, of course -- especially if it was coupled with Maria’s downward-curving lips. But unless Toby started moonlighting as an expert in black-market antiquities, there was no way for him to get Andy annoyed, and Andy blissful was a truly suffocating experience, matched in awfulness only by Andy broken-hearted and blinking back tears.)

But even as Toby thought of that -- standing in his kitchen, frying an egg -- another memory floated to his brain: the previous night and Andy undoing his belt buckle and saying, gently, _Please, Toby, no more poems tonight, please._

“What are you doing for the holidays?” Andy asked.

“Beach house,” Toby said briefly, levering a spatula under the egg and flipping it. “Going to be there with Olivia.”

“I remember Olivia,” Andy said, and something in the way he said it made Toby pause and glance at him from the corner of his eye.

Andy met his gaze blandly.

“Hmm,” Toby said as a lot of little half-formed thoughts suddenly came together in his brain.

He handed Andy a plate with his egg. “There’s some salt at your elbow. Here’s a fork.”

“Looks scrumptious,” Andy said with every indication of sincerity, even though the egg looked wrinkled and sickly.

Toby leaned casually against the edge of the counter. “Hey, Andy. You wanna come to the beach house with me? Spend Christmas with me and the fam?”

Andy paused as he sawed at his egg and looked up at Toby in surprise. “At Illyria? Yes, you’ve mentioned your family had a house there. Um.” Andy blinked. “I mean, I don’t know--”

“Olivia said she wished you would come,” Toby lied.

This was, of course, deeply improbable, but Andy did not question it. He visibly brightened. “She did?”

“She did,” Toby affirmed. “She was telling me how much she wished...that you and she could keep discussing...Latin declensions.”

Andy frowned slightly at this. “Well, they are a fascinating grammatical concept, it’s true--”

“Anyway,” Toby said hastily. “It would be great if you could come, Andy. I think it’s really important that we have a lot of people over for Christmas. It’s the first Christmas since my brother passed away, you know. And we should really rally around Olivia.” Toby paused and frowned as if a thought had suddenly occurred to him. “Although it’s so late. Flights will be so expensive to Illyria by now…”

“Oh, but let’s see,” Andy said, pulling out his phone. He tapped on it briskly while Toby took a long drink of coffee. “See, there are flights tomorrow, and still seats in first-class. It’s still possible!”

Toby made a futile pawing motion at his now-dead phone. “Tomorrow? I’d change my flight but--”

Andy made a dismissive gesture. “Best to jump on it now, Toby. I’ll go ahead and buy two tickets, and you can just Venmo me and change your other flight later.”

“I will absolutely Venmo you,” Toby said into his coffee.

“Smashing,” Andy said cheerfully. “Do you prefer a window or an aisle seat?”

“Window."

Tap, tap. “Done,” Andy cried with such obvious delight that Toby felt a moment of unaccustomed regret, maybe even the faintest unfamiliar touch of guilt.

He opened his mouth and paused.

“Did you say something?” Andy said, looking up.

“Rental car,” Toby said. “I said, ‘don’t forget to arrange a rental car at the airport.’”


End file.
